British Military Intelligence in the Crimean War, 1854-1856

Stephen M. Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780714646718
• eBook ISBN: 9781135244934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This is a study of the British military intelligence operations during the Crimean War. It details the beginnings of the intelligence operations as a result of the British Commander, Lord Raglan's, need for information on the enemy, and traces the subsequent development of the system.

1
Raglan, Simmons and the Want of Reliable Intelligence in the Principalities

According to von Clausewitz,

By 'intelligence' we mean every sort of information about the enemy and his country - the basis, in short, of our own plans and operations. [...]

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain. [...] In short, most intelligence is false, and the effect of fear is to multiply lies and inaccuracies. [...] The commander must trust his judgment and stand like a rock on which the waves [of reported danger] break in vain.¹

Von Clausewitz's views about the limits to intelligence shaped his theory of the 'friction of War'. In the early months of Lord Raglan's campaign in the East, however, friction was produced by virtually complete ignorance, rather than through the uncertainty generated by partial or inconsistent information. The obvious question is why British military intelligence was so ill prepared for this war.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British Army developed several effective intelligence services. Following Waterloo, all these - the Duke of Wellington's system for the collection of operational intelligence, the Quartermaster-General's Depot of Military Knowledge, and the Peninsula Corps of Guides - were allowed to atrophy. The only organizational survivor of the Napoleonic Wars, the Depot of Military Knowledge, was relegated to obscurity within the Quartermaster-General's Department. Its remnants produced hardly any new maps or estimates of foreign armies.² The Great Peace had arrived. Britain avoided war in Europe for almost 40 years. While the Army and the Navy experienced considerable success in their colonial wars, these successes occurred without the need to create a centralized or permanent intelligence system.³ Only in India was a military intelligence system retained, to deal with the specialized needs of British rule in the subcontinent. There was no requirement for organized military intelligence to continue in Britain, although a tradition of the means to improvise such a system when necessary did survive. The Army's approach to intelligence was transferred through this traditional, rather than organizational, means.

Practical experience with intelligence as military secretary to Wellington in the Peninsular campaign had firmly ingrained this tradition in Raglan. Authors such as Jac Weller and David Chandler regard Wellington's system as 'one of the best ever devised'. Certainly some of the Duke's approaches rubbed off on his old lieutenant, despite differences in their style and quality as commanders.⁴ Both Raglan and Wellington appreciated the importance of intelligence and used it in their operational planning. Both expressed a distaste for spies but overcame it. Neither was able to rely on cavalry reconnaissance as a source of intelligence because their cavalry was not trained for such work. Both the Iron Duke and Raglan trusted a small number of personnel for specialist intelligence duties - for Wellington, the cryptanalyst Captain George Scovell; for Raglan, Charles Cattley - but neither was willing to leave their intelligence system to the supervision of another senior officer. Although he employed many soldiers and civilians in gathering intelligence, Wellington refused to trust anyone else with its organization or final analysis.⁵ Raglan did not entrust the supervision of intelligence to his adjutants nor even to his Chief of Staff, General Sir James Simpson.⁶ That is, intelligence was directly controlled by and responsible to the Commander-in-Chief, rather than being a function of the staff. While Raglan had little hands-on involvement with his SID in the Crimea, conversely in the Peninsula Wellington directly participated in intelligence work, even interrogating prisoners, reading northern European and local newspapers, and accompanying irregular scouts on patrol. Raglan rarely performed such work. The Iron Duke found that money expedited the flow of intelligence.⁷ Raglan was frugal in this respect.⁸ Wellington was a supremely self-confident strategist, while Raglan was more inclined to find and follow the advice of experts.

In the Peninsula, moreover, Wellington had intelligence advantages over Raglan in the Crimea. Wellington's Army received 'universal [support] of immense value' from the local inhabitants. Although many Tartars volunteered their lives for Cattley in the Crimea, some betrayed the Allies. Most Greeks and Russians were understandably hostile. Topographical information was given a high priority during the Peninsular War with many maps being produced.⁹ This appears to have received less attention in the Crimea, perhaps because of the static nature of the conflict. Wellington also received a 'constant stream' of captured enemy correspondence, and the British were able to break the enemy's codes during most of the war.¹⁰ There is no evidence that the same occurred in the Crimean War.

In any case, in 1854 reliance on this tradition of ad hoc intelligence systems meant that few officers could provide the intelligence required for the approaching war with Russia - few could even speak the language. The main exception to this rule arose by accident. Major Thomas Best Jervis, a retired officer of the East India Company Army's Bombay Engineers, privately discovered copies of the Russian General Staff's map of the Crimea and the Austrian Army's map of European Turkey. The government wanted copies of these maps but at his expense; however, it quickly provided £48 to reproduce the Crimean maps.¹¹ This was augmented by a geological map of the Dobrudja region in European Turkey given by the London 'bookseller' Murray (presumably John Murray, the publisher) to Lord Raglan.¹² Jervis's map of the Crimea was used in the flank march to Balaclava in late September 1854 and was distributed to many field officers.¹³

Jervis's efforts were unofficial and largely irrelevant to the war, although significant to the future development of British military intelligence. Not until February 1855 did the Army and the Treasury approve the formation of a Topographical and Statistical (T&S) Department, under his superintendence, within the War Department. This body produced maps for the war against Russia, but none of these was forwarded to the Crimea until the war was, in effect, over. It did not meet the statistical component of its duties, namely that of compiling material on the order of battle, climate, resources and detailed 'on-the-ground' knowledge of the environs of the Crimea; nor did it collect operational intelligence for this conflict.¹⁴ The T&S Department provided only cartographical services. Anything else would have to come from other, sometimes unofficial, sources and these would take time to establish.

In March 1854 the British Army entered its first continental war in almost 40 years. By early April its forces moved to Turkey to deter a Russian advance on Constantinople, and, in order to do so, it immediately needed intelligence on Russian military deployments, movements and intentions. The secondary sources entirely ignore the issue of British military intelligence in the Balkan theatre. Raglan did not, and could not. He could not predict the enemy's actions nor did he trust those of his Turkish ally. He wrote, for example, 'that it would neither be desirable nor safe for Omar Pasha [the Turkish Commander-in-Chief in the Balkans] to extend his Army as he has lately been instructed to do'.¹⁵ Raglan also suffered from a critical and universal want of information on almost every aspect of the Balkan theatre. He found an existing means to deal with this problem, for a British officer was already involved in intelligence, among other duties, under the direction of the British Ambassador to the Porte, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.

In autumn 1853, this officer, Captain (later brevet Colonel) Lintorn Simmons, Royal Engineers, was traveling in eastern Europe while on leave from his duties as Secretary to the Railway Commiss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Tables
• Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: 'Much Valuable Information'
• 1 Raglan, Simmons and the Want of Reliable Intelligence in the Principalities
• 2 Into the Unknown
• 3 The Lottery: British Intelligence from Calamita Bay to Inkerman
• 4 The Diplomat Turned Spymaster
• 5 Regiments, Rations and Reinforcements: Cattley's Intelligence Efforts from November 1854 to July 1855
• 6 Tracking the Beaten Enemy
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index